Most people (libertarians excepted) think that government is a voluntary arrangement. That is how they justify taxation as not being theft and draft as not being slavery.
If so, what is wrong with voluntarily merging or splitting?

What is the optimal region of government? Why would the current boundaries be the best?
Truly voluntary organizations (clubs, associations, firms, groups of friends, marriages) merge and split all the time. That is part of experimentation to find better arrangements. If government is voluntary too, why should its boundaries remain static?

Citation needed.
Being a libertarian (a voluntaryist or anarcho-capitalist to be precise), I recognize all those real problems and I see a lot of concerns from fellow libertarians as well. But we favor voluntary solutions.

That the case of each of the concerns you raise. See: private provision of and the market for security (Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Stefan Kinsella, David Friedman and other wrote tomes on this), free-market environmentalism (see Walter Block on this topic), free-market consumer protection (Milton Friedman and many others, that's an easy topic), economic development and lifting people out of poverty (from Adam Smith to Deidre McCloskey, this is a very important topic for helping countries develop, see China and India versus some other Asian or African countries), increasing productivity and innovation leading to improved quality and lower prices (that includes healthcare, see John Cochrane, Bob Murphy, Sheldon Richman). You'll find tons of content on all those important topics.
But, we do not see the usage of coercion as a valid solution, as "the ends justifies the means" (such as imposing ones will on others by use of politics and force) leads to the means being taken over by special interests.
Pointing out to a problem and assuming that government has legitimacy or can do a better job is a non sequitur. For every "market failure" argument, there is a government failure argument (see public choice theory) and an objection to the use of force.

Yes, BitCoin has some similarities with gold, but I don't think that is the core reason people, including libertarians, are interested in it.
Libertarians (and most people for that matter) recognize the benefit of competitive provision of goods and services in the voluntary framework of property rights. Establishing a monopoly is a bad recipe for providing a quality service. Money and banking are not exempt from such considerations, and we see the effects of bank cartelization around central banks.

I'm not going to argue the various advantages or disadvantages of BitCoin (energy consumption), but I do recognize that there are trade-offs. That's the point when people get to choose which money they want to rely on. BitCoins offer advantages in return (peer to peer transactions).


Aside from that, I want to address two incorrect claims from the author:
1) money that doesn't inflate is bad (presumably compared to money from central banks):
Both economic theory and historical evidence debunk this claim. See George Selgin on the track record of the Fed on its self-declared goals (price stability, anti-cyclical effect, employment).
Also, see Mises/Hayek on the negative effects of monetary inflation and credit expansion, namely bubbles and accretion of power to the early recipients of money and the well-connected (Cantillon effect).

2) lack of regulation opens up shady transactions:
This is logically incorrect. It's not the lack of regulation, but the relative anonymity of BitCoin which opens up such possibilities. Cash and other commodities can be used to the same effect despite being regulated.
Again, different systems of currencies offer different trade-offs for people to choose, that is the beauty of experimentation and innovation.

"The most important part of our work was testing the skill of each of these approaches in reconstructing unobserved temperatures. To do this we took the observed data and further reduced the coverage by setting aside some of the observations."

Let's look at the method. You remove Sahara or some region where you actually have data, you build models to make guesses for that area and evaluate those model against those self-imposed test data sets.
How do you know if your model performs as good in Antarctica as it did in Sahara?

Without some actual measurements for the areas that lack measurement (South and North Poles), you don't know how confident you should be in that method.

Except Australia could be doing better, in particular the poor. Here's a quick recap of studies by Stossel on minimum wage in Australia. I also recommend you check out the Roy Morgan polls and studies regarding unemployment and under-employment in Australia.

Quote:
In a 2004 study published in the Australian Economic Review, economist Andrew Leigh looked at what happened after Western Australia increased its minimum wage compared to the rest of Australia.
He found: "Relative to the rest of Australia, the [percentage of people employed] in Western Australia fell following each of six [minimum wage] rises." (Study here [1], update here [2].)

Another Australian economist, John Humphrey, summarizes [3] the findings this way:
"[Leigh found] that for each 1 percent increase in the minimum wage we can expect... [to lose] 96,000 jobs" in Australia.

[1] http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/Minimum%20Wages%20(AER).pdf
[2] http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/Minimum_wages_reply.pdf
[3] http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4064106.html

From the article, they looked at "nearly 12 years, scrubbing through several data bases to find troubled outcomes. Researchers found 245 incidents reported to the FDA, including 71 deaths and 174 nonfatal injuries. But they also found eight cases in which reporting fell short, including five cases in which no FDA report was filed at all."

I have no doubt that the reporting isn't perfect, but those numbers don't suggest a massive problem. Let's put things in perspective.

The rhetoric of politics can get pretty confusing. Usually, protection means protection from force, trespass and other forms of violation of property rights.
In this case, Amazon did not use any such force against independent booksellers. It is actually those booksellers who are using force against Amazon through government.
So it is more accurate to say that the French government moves to grant French independent booksellers special privileges. Stopping your competitors from doing a better job than you isn't protection, it's aggression.

If intellectual property (such as patents) are really property, why does it matter if you're using the invention or keeping it for later?
If you own a bike, it does not and should not matter whether you ride it, store it in your garage or use it for parts.
If ideas can also rightly be owned, then it does not matter whether the patent holder uses the idea to produce anything yourself or stores the patent in a drawer.
Patents are the problem, not non-practicing patent holders.

While standardization has some benefits, diversity also has benefits. Diversity allows for innovation and experimenting with different ways of solving the problem.
Even if Apple started using micro-USB now, that does not mean that we would have a single universal connector, because other new connectors would emerge with improvements.
In short, there is a balance that naturally emerges from this trade-off. More standardization is not always better and the optimal number is not one.

I was curious what the questionnaire was like. The OECD site has a sample in case you're curious: http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Education%20and%20Skills_online%20sample%20items.ppt

I am glad to see such voluntary systems re-emerge. The theory that some services like protection of rights has to be provided by a government monopoly is wrong.

Not only can such service be provided and funded voluntarily (as this crowdfunding example), but I'd expect the results to be better. Private guards don't have incentives to escalate and threaten like cops, since this kind of treatment is liable to be expensive in the long-run and that means they'd lose to competition which provides a better service at a lower cost. They also have more incentives towards prevention and generally what their customers care about.

If I recall correctly another historical example of such system (private protection system for neighborhoods) is the San Francisco Patrol Special Police. Merchants have incentives to keep the streets safe and civil (no police harassment) to attract customers.

For those interested in the question of how such a system of private and voluntary services could scale to many agencies and without a government monopoly sitting on top, see Bob Murphy's essay "Chaos Theory" which offers an insightful analysis. For example, would protection firms start fighting each others? (Hint: unlikely)

Doesn't the same logic apply to cops? Why should cops magically be immune to liability?

I would favor crowdfunded protection services over taxfunded police, because they are liable and they are subject to competition and loss of business. Both give them incentives to treat their clientele and people they interact with civilly (rather than threaten and escalate excessively).

Ideally, I'd combine this with a system of restitution where your protection or insurance company tries to recover the stolen goods or make the victim whole in some sense. This would be better than prison, for which the victim pays the bills and which do little to rehabilitate criminals. Having to apologize, negotiate and work towards a restitution is more constructive.

Again an example of an agency, supposedly designed to protect the American people, whose actions results in undermining safety and eroding trust.
There is no such thing as a universal level of security (regarding arguments like "it wasn't secure enough before"). In some neighborhoods, you need to put bars on the windows. In others, you don't.
What the NSA has done is make the internet a less safe neighborhood than otherwise. People will now have to put more virtual locks and bars. More effort on security and less on more productive features...

But was The Jungle anywhere close to true? It does not seem so.


Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meatpacking business and spent a grand total of two and one-half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly-written report with preconceived conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless an historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing”8 of the meatpacking process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed.9
9. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the So-called “Beveridge Amendment” to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, p. 102
Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/ideas-and-consequences-of-meat-and-myth#ixzz2gK8kSBB9

“The Jungle” is a pure work of fiction. It has absolutely no basis in reality. A 1906 report by the Bureau of Animal Industry refuted Sinclair’s severest allegations, characterizing them as “intentionally misleading and false,” “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” and “utter absurdity.” Quoting Mr. Crumpacker on Sinclair’s allegations of diseased meats, “the chief inspector said there was not a single animal that went into the slaughterhouses that was not inspected before it went on foot; and if one was diseased, had a lumpy jaw, or appeared to be out of condition, he was separated, and then a skilled veterinarian made a thorough examination of that animal after the rest had been passed; and then they had inspection on the inside.”
Read more at http://www.libertariannews.org/2010/09/17/meat-packers-rape-you-and-you-love-it/

Standardization of chargers has largely taken place already. You have Apple devices with Lightning connectors and the rest which pretty much use micro USB.
Personally, I prefer Lightning.
Also, I'm sure that further improvements will be made (which government-mandated standardization will make more difficult).